Water Studies

By Virginia Mann

An astounding art discovery reunites a family. Fact and fiction are choreographed into a multi-layered tale spanning a century across a canvas of three continents. Chronologically shifting between dual narratives, the first begins in 1901 with the acquisition by British book collector, John Winslow, of two mysterious sketchbooks, lost for centuries, found in a remote fishing village in Italy. A restless and adventurous man, he emigrates to the flourishing frontier of Western Australia, raises a family, and establishes a deep love for his new land. The family is torn asunder when his daughter, Willy, who considers Australia a backwater, flees to Hollywood in 1939 to seek her fortune as a movie star. As a parting gift, she takes the two sketchbooks with her. After having an illegitimate daughter, Lacey, in 1941, she leaves the child with a friend, along with one of the sketchbooks, and escapes to New York for a Broadway audition, marries, changes her name and vanishes. She has a second daughter, Margo, in 1943. Lacey, raised in the glitzy world of Hollywood, becomes an internationally known photographer. She has one of the sketchbooks, which she treasures as the only link to her mother. Margo grows up in the posh Hamptons, emotionally distant from her mother, and becomes the flamboyant owner of a powerful art gallery in Manhattan. When her mother dies, Margo discovers the second sketchbook. Suspecting it may be a significant find, she takes it to the curator of Renaissance art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to be identified. As the narratives gradually connect, the shocking evidence of the sketchbooks emerges and the strands of the tangled fates of the two daughters converge in 1993. The astonishing conclusion will change their lives forever.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692946152
• ISBN13: 9780692946152
• Release Date: February 2018
• Publisher: Breton Bay
• Length: 386 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"